When the Wine is Bitterhttp://whenthewineisbitter.com
Travels and Other Things in the Aegean and BeyondTue, 01 May 2018 13:47:56 +0000en-AUhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.6https://i1.wp.com/whenthewineisbitter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/cropped-cover-peloponnese-journey1-2.jpg?fit=32%2C32When the Wine is Bitterhttp://whenthewineisbitter.com
3232139778340At George Househttp://whenthewineisbitter.com/at-george-house/
http://whenthewineisbitter.com/at-george-house/#commentsTue, 01 May 2018 04:21:21 +0000http://whenthewineisbitter.com/?p=861Today I established a new writing spot. After getting a small, folding wooden table and…

]]>Today I established a new writing spot. After getting a small, folding wooden table and plastic garden chair from Hassan I set myself up on one of the stilted wooden platforms at the bottom of the garden, just where it begins to fall away to the lip of the gorge.

There are four of these platforms standing one beside the other, tacked on like an afterthought at the end of a row of cabins. According to Hassan, who refers to them as ‘treehouses’, visiting campers set their tents up in them, although they are also, he says, a pleasant place to sit on hot afternoons. Structurally they are not going to win any design awards, being cobbled together from rough-hewn timber planks, with a low parapet around the sides and overhead a pitched plyboard roof. But the outlook is fantastic, of verdant terraces rising upwards from the gorge beneath a billowing of trees – olive mostly, but also pomegranate, fig, citrus and carob – with here and there the red roof of a village house protruding from the greenery and, higher up, pine-clad slopes that evolve into jagged cliffs of grey-and-ochre-coloured limestone. The latter enfold the valley in an amphitheatre-like arrangement; they are fissured by gorges and shattered by rockfalls and ultimately drop some four hundred metres into the depths of a canyon that, named after an elusive species of butterfly, opens to the sea. Overlooking all this, visible away in the distance, is the earthquake-ravaged pinnacle of Baba daǧ, ‘Father Mountain’, from the peak of which paragliders launch themselves, forming daisy chains of colour across the sky as they waft down to the beach at Ӧlüdeniz. All in all it’s quite a sight and I confess myself smitten.

When I arrived here, in the middle of March, I entertained plans to live fulltime in one of these outposts. Partly my inspiration was economical; a platform would be cheaper than a cabin, I reasoned, and I could put the difference towards wine (not a negligible consideration in a country where alcohol is relatively expensive). But I was also attracted by the picturesque quality of living out of doors. Hassan, who is nothing if not considerate, advised me to think about it. And, sure enough, it soon became apparent that at this time of year the allure of an al fresco existence was limited by the weather, which was chronically unstable and often wet. As the days went by and I became increasingly attached to my cabin the idea faded from my mind; it seemed to make sense, given that I was travelling with a laptop and camera, to have a door that I could lock behind me. Not that there are too many miscreants in these parts; Faralya is a farming and beekeeping village, with almost as many animals as people, and the clientele at George House consists of an internationally diverse and relentlessly transient population of trekkers who are, quite literally, here today, gone tomorrow. The atmosphere as a result is reassuringly secure.

For the record, it was as a trekker that I first discovered this spectacularly-sited and amenable camp. It was May 2006 and I had recently embarked on the Lycian Way, a long-distance walking trail that unfurls around the southwest Turkish coast between Fethiye and Antalya. The trek is some five hundred kilometres in length, but my first day had been inauspicious: I was hot and out of condition and taken unawares, what’s more, by the heat which was extreme and like nothing I had experienced up to that point in Greece. The problem, I gathered, was the mountains which soared almost vertically out of the sea and acted like a natural windbreak, creating an oppressive hothouse atmosphere in which walking was, to be frank, a drudge. I’d been in Turkey less than a week but already I was heartily sick of it, dreading the thought of the road ahead and longing for my windswept Greek island home.

I arrived at George House on the afternoon of my first full day on the trail, with aching feet and a hole in my trousers. A sign on the village road directed me down a steep drive, past tiers of ramshackle gardens lush with fruit trees. Tumbledown houses appeared here and there among the foliage. Goats grazed in sun-dappled shadows and I startled a flock of chickens who fled at my approach, sprinting comically down the road as fast as their little legs would carry them. At the bottom of the drive I came to a solid-looking two-storey house; it had been recently whitewashed and on the lower veranda sat a couple of people, a rather stern-faced man and a woman wearing a headscarf and tinted spectacles. The man was bald and, I noticed, missing his right hand – a striking combination. He glared at me for some time with an expression that not even the most optimistic traveller could describe as welcoming – in fact, I received the impression that he was building up a head of steam – before suddenly blurting out, with disconcerting vehemence, ‘Full!’

This was a blow, as George House was highly recommended. I was also less than thrilled by the idea of trudging back up to the road and seeking alternative accommodation in the village. (I didn’t even know if there was alternative accommodation.) Possibly the bald man noticed my ambivalence about leaving, because the next thing I knew he shouted again, this time for ‘Eric’.

The latter appeared with an alacrity that made me suspect he’d been hovering just around the corner, awaiting his summons. He was a slender man of average height, dressed in impeccably faded jeans and a pressed white shirt, with pale, delicate features, sandy hair that flopped low over his forehead and a blonde, neatly trimmed beard which gave his face an aristocratic cast. In a story I subsequently wrote about the episode, I described him as being straight out of a nineteenth-century Russian novel – a dissident poet, perhaps, or a closet revolutionary – and this basically nails it. He greeted me with a curt nod (I must, after all, have been a sight, covered in sweat and dirt from the trail) conversed briefly in Turkish with the bald man and, looking unimpressed with the role that had been assigned him, led me away into the garden.

We passed a row of wooden cabins that had all the simplicity of a loggers’ camp. Beyond them a path of well-tramped earth wound downhill through a jumble of trees, past dense growths of sage and yellowing grass and clumps of cistus whose flowers had long ago shrivelled to nothingness. Insects cavorted among the undergrowth and I was aware of the buzzing of bees, loud in the hot, mid-afternoon stillness, and the occasional rustle of a scarpering lizard. At last we came to several large and venerable oaks, high up in one of which Eric pointed out a rough assembly of boards reached by an apple-picker’s ladder and hung with what looked like bedsheets for curtains. He called the structure a ‘treehouse’, speaking in a sceptical tone of voice that seemed to indicate he wouldn’t sleep in it if you paid him. ‘Mind the scorpions,’ he added, before wandering away back through the garden.

I spent the afternoon beneath a mulberry tree in the yard, mending my trousers. The air grew fresh as shadows lengthened and the heat went out of the day. From up here there were airy views out over the gorge and across the sea to a complex of islands and peninsulas, each set in a frothing glacé of white mist. People came and went, providing diversion. Most noteworthy was a fire-eater from Munich whom I christened ‘Siegfried’ – lean, blonde and sun-ravaged, and trailing behind him a small, harassed-looking wife, this fantastic, if somewhat garrulous, individual was pure Teutonic myth.

The pair emerged, running with sweat, but magnificently triumphant (at least he was; she looked more than a little worse for wear although willing, I sensed, to follow her husband to hell and back if necessary), from the Kelebekler Vadisi, or Butterfly Valley, the gaping, sheer-sided canyon that originally put the otherwise unremarkable farming village of Faralya on the map. Helping himself freely to George’s complimentary instant coffee – in theory at least reserved for guests of the establishment – Siegfried explained how he and his wife had caught a boat from Ӧlüdeniz to the beach at the end of the valley, went for a quick swim and then tackled the ascent.

He spoke in German, which he obviously assumed I understood. The climb had been ‘sehr schwer,’ he assured me, ‘very difficult’, but because he and his wife lived in the Alps and were accustomed to mountains, they had managed it easily. Tomorrow, he intimated, they would attempt some equally daring exploit, in another part of the country far from Faralya. Having proffered this information he drained his cup, gave me a cheerful wave and strode off with his wife in tow, presumably to catch a dolmuş to the scene of their next adventure.

I meanwhile went for a stroll among the trees in the garden, where I was surprised to meet another bald man who was also missing a hand. I have since considered that it may well have been the same person, although at the time I was convinced of the existence of two bald one-handed men. I found the coincidence intriguing – was it, I couldn’t help wondering, a congenital family defect or merely a simple case of poorly executed dynamite fishing? At the same time it put me in a quandary: clearly there was more than one candidate for the title of George.

Eventually I returned to the yard, where fires burned in a number of outdoor ovens and pillars of smoke, wonderfully fragrant, billowed into the evening sky. There was also a new buzz around the place, the two walking groups that occupied it having returned from their respective adventures. One of these groups was English, the other French; utterances in the two languages flew back and forth on the now pleasantly temperate air. As the dinner hour approached the two individual camps coalesced and I felt momentarily at a loss, unsure of where I should fit myself in, but then Eric appeared at my side. ‘Unless you’d like to eat with the French,’ he said, somewhat drolly, ‘I suggest you go upstairs.’

I did as he said, only to find myself baled up by a cheerfully grinning old woman who insisted that I check my shoes at the door. After complying with this instruction I joined a rowdy assembly of English men and women sitting in a circle on the floor of a large room attractively panelled in pale blonde timber. Through the open windows, just as I sat down, the sunset wail of the local muezzin unceremoniously crashed. For long and, I must say, rather dreary moments the man’s cracked and mildly demented-sounding voice filled the room, although the Brits, to their credit, remained unmoved, their attention focused solely on the many pots and dishes that occupied several low, round wooden tables in the centre of the circle. These contained staples like rice and salad, as well as a number of casseroles made of pulses and vegetables – speedily emptied, they were replenished just as swiftly by a team of smiling women in headscarves and loose-fitting trousers who came and went with the fleet-footed elegance of culinary djinns.

I can’t remember what exactly I ate, only that it was delicious; I washed it down with a can of Efes pilsener and finished with two large helpings of yummy homemade yogurt laced with local honey. Throughout the meal I chatted with Eric, who, unlike me, sat comfortably in an enviably loose-limbed full-lotus posture; I learned that he came from Belgium and worked as an anthropologist, mostly in Morocco, and visited George House several times a year in order, he said, to relax. He listened politely to the tale of my afternoon’s adventures but claimed to be unaware of the existence of a doppelgӓnger. ‘And by the way,’ he added, ‘the man’s name isn’t George.’

The experience made an impression on me. I wrote a story about it, a patchy and irreverent piece that subsequently appeared in the travel pages of The Australian. And recently, when I was trying to think of a place where I could hole up for a while and do some work, George House Pension came to mind. Twelve years had passed since that original, and very brief, visit, but I had the feeling, as I recalled the stunning location, great food and friendly, warm-hearted people, that it might just be the place for me. After more than six weeks in residence, I’m happy to say that for once in my life my instinct appears to have been right on the money.

]]>We arrived at Herakleion in a bleak, wet dawn. A damp wind gusted from the north and gloomy underworld light blotched the eastern sky as we crept into the harbour past the crumbling Venetian breakwater, the engines droning a low persistent note and waves slapping audibly against the hull. I followed our progress from the railing on the upper deck, hugging myself against the cold while peering out over the drab concrete crenulations of the Cretan capital in search of familiar landmarks.

To the west a barrage of inky cloud had blotted Psiloritis, the ‘roof of Crete’, from the landscape. To the south, however, I could make out the distinctive bulk of Juktas – sacred mountain of the ancient Minoans of Knossos – looming out of the murk. As I gazed I recalled its lovely pine-and-cypress-clad slopes and thought with happy anticipation of Archanes, spilling, amidst vines and olive trees, down a hillside beneath it. For some years now the lively working village had been home to S and, as such, was my current destination. After a couple of long journeys interspersed with some low-level roistering, I was looking forward to putting my feet up.

Then the ferry launched into a slow and ponderous half-turn on the leaden waters of the harbour and I held on to the rail as deck shuddered beneath me. Far below on the dock a small crowd waited, tense and expectant among an assortment of vehicles, eyes riveted on the ferry. The shaking continued sporadically as the vessel reversed towards them and the large metal ramp at the back went down, its descent accompanied by a strange electronic beeping. I watched with the usual pleasure as two crew members in khaki overalls stepped out upon it, as though on to a stage, each holding a coil of rope in his hands. These they cast in long looping arcs out over the water, landing them with practised ease on opposite sides of the dock where they were chased down by a pair of men who, hauling furiously, pulled up thick plaited hawsers which they looped, heavy and dripping with seawater, over rusty iron bollards. The hawsers pulled taut as the vessel’s screws churned the water white and the ramp swayed, despite best efforts to restrain it, back and forth along the dock. At this point pandemonium erupted among those waiting, with engines igniting one after another and people charging forward, only to be checked by a contingent of harbour policemen in dark navy uniforms who blew shrilly on whistles and gesticulated frantically with their arms.

This was the signal to return below, where I joined the rest of the passengers waiting in the foyer. Ten long minutes passed before the doors finally opened and we were let loose. I sped down the stairs, charged through the clanging, crowded, evil-smelling garage and, with an inner cheer, took my first step on to Cretan soil over a ramp that shifted disconcertingly beneath my feet. The policemen were still blowing on their whistles and all around me people were shouting. It was the inimitable, and quite delightful, pantomime of a Greek island arrival, its addictive energy undiminished even in the depths of winter. A lorry rumbled past, swaying under its load and belching clouds of acrid smoke; while I staggered towards the exit, bent beneath the weight of my three rucksacks. Emerging into the carpark a small red car caught my eye and, climbing from it, I saw a familiar figure. ‘Welcome to Crete,’ said S, grinning broadly and obliviously enjoying the surprise she’d sprung on me by managing to get out of bed in time to meet the boat. We had initially arranged that I would catch the bus to Archanes, but this was much better. I threw myself with gusto into my old girlfriend’s embrace.

My enthusiasm waned somewhat when, upon seating ourselves in the car, S turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened. ‘Uh-oh,’ she said, before admitting to having waited for the ferry in the car with both the heating and the radio switched on. This was probably a bad idea, she said, given that she had recently been experiencing problems with the battery. I had to agree, although I did so in an undertone.

Just then a contingent of harbour police and army recruits, the latter in full regalia, caught S’s eye. She was out of the car in a flash, but her attempt to enlist their aid came to nothing. ‘They’re busy looking for illegal immigrants,’ S reported, as she climbed, shivering, back into the car.

I then bowed to the inevitable and offered to push. It was a rash idea but I rather enjoyed the experience as, beneath a lightening sky, in gusting wind and spitting rain, I cast off jet and ship lag to propel the vehicle, at a pedestrian rate, from one end to the other of what seemed to me an extremely long car park. Yet despite my efforts the engine refused to respond and we sat for some minutes, despondently idle, in a lonely corner before S came up with Plan B. This entailed phoning her road service provider and asking for assistance.

She took out her iPhone and as I listened to her explain our predicament, in flawless Greek, to the man on the other end – who barked back a series of questions – while gusts of wind shook the car and raindrops trickled down the windscreen, I thought to myself what a wonderful thing travel was, so full of surprises, a sure-fire bringer of joy and wonder and, overall, a mighty enhancer of life. S, meanwhile, had good news: the road assistance people were on their way.

Barely a couple of minutes later, a large and brightly gleaming black 4X4, with dark-tinted windows, pulled up in front us with a dramatic flourish and slamming of brakes. The flashy manoeuvre bore a striking resemblance to the sort of thing one saw on television police shows. Road assistance, clearly, had come a long way on Crete. S was equally impressed, remarking that her outfit had arrived more promptly than she had expected and adding that the tinted windows were a good look. The words were no sooner out of her mouth than all four doors of the vehicle sprung open and out leapt the boys from the army in their camouflage gear, one of them clasping a set of jumper leads in his hand and all of them grinning crazily, as if at the start of a jolly game. The harbour police arrived, in no less impressive a manner, in their big white car, a moment or two later – and while the combined forces went to work, the commander took the opportunity to chat S up.

He was still at it long after the job had been completed and the engine was smoothly purring, which I thought was overdoing it a little. But eventually he desisted and we got on our way.

]]>http://whenthewineisbitter.com/arrival/feed/2856Loose Endshttp://whenthewineisbitter.com/loose-ends/
http://whenthewineisbitter.com/loose-ends/#commentsSun, 01 Apr 2018 09:07:50 +0000http://whenthewineisbitter.com/?p=842It goes without saying that I eventually made it to Crete. More surprisingly, I even…

It goes without saying that I eventually made it to Crete. More surprisingly, I even made it into the centre of Athens, although not before kicking around in Piraeus for the best part of the day, cooling my heels and feeling mildly stymied by the way events were unfolding.

What actually happened was this:

After my second stint at Kafeneion O Stamatis, I packed my notebook away and went for a walk. In my experience this is a great way of getting to know the ins and outs of a place, allowing the keen-eyed traveller to seek out the hidden corners, secret treasures and what have you of foreign places. I wasn’t sure what undiscovered marvels a place like Piraeus might have in store for me, but, if nothing else, I figured a brisk walk would at least serve to set up me for lunch. It’s wonderful how much better a Greek salad, say, or a bottle of retsina, tastes after one has marched up and down a few hills.

With the harbour at my back I set off vaguely inland, setting a course along what seemed like an entire street of shops specialising in women’s lingerie. I passed a church with stained glass windows and a bulbous blue dome. Then, leaving the traffic and the crowded thoroughfares behind, I climbed into what I guess was a pretty typical Athenian neighbourhood. The streets up here were narrow and quiet and lined by uniformly drab concrete apartment blocks, each painted white or a shade thereof, and featuring cast-iron balcony railings, aluminium shutters on doors and windows and canvas awnings, bleached to a nostalgic pallor, that people rolled down when the weather became hot.

It was a far cry from the blue-and-white Kykladic dream or even the scattered remnants of neoclassical Athens. But every building was scrupulously tidy and redeeming shades of colour appeared in the rows of potted plants on balconies and the occasional elaborately hued rug hung out to air. Here and there, too, isolated among the concrete, stood tiny single-storey dwellings with roughly stuccoed walls painted a washed-out shade of ochre, a cat and a lemon tree in a pocket-sized courtyard, and timber window shutters hanging at a lopsided angle. They were relics of an earlier, more graceful and less cluttered era, dating back, possibly, to the days when places like Athens and Piraeus had been little more than villages. It required a long stretch of the imagination to visualise that now.

Meanwhile I kept climbing, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sea, and of the landforms that enfold it, from some airy perch. I have always loved the view from these parts of the mountains of the Peloponnese looming, mysterious and inky, across the Saronic Gulf. I also like how from high up one can see the island of Salamis – a large but innocuous-looking lump of palely coloured rock – where, in September 480BC, an Athenian-dominated Greek navy checked a far larger Persian fleet in a momentous battle that helped save Greece from foreign domination and arguably turned the tide of history.

There’s a good story about how the Athenian general and statesman Themistocles, having convinced his fellow citizens to abandon their city and take to their ships, tricked the Persians, sending a messenger to their camp the night before the battle to say that the Greek navy was in the strait between the mainland and the island and planning to escape. The Persians fell for the ruse: at dawn next morning they sailed en masse into the narrow body of water, where their large and unwieldy ships were no match for the smaller, faster and more agile Greek vessels which, manned by dedicated sailors who knew the sea and were fighting for their freedom, completely routed them.

Themistocles went on to have a long and illustrious career, laying the foundations for the glories of the Periclean age – he it was who built up the strength of the navy and instigated the construction of the long walls from the city to the Piraeus – before dying in exile somewhere in modern-day Turkey. As for me, I came up against a playground and an assortment of other buildings that halted my trajectory and, as I wasn’t really fussed about seeing the Peloponnese or Salamis, I turned around and retraced my steps down the hill.

On the way I encountered an outdoor fruit and vegetable market. This was a truly wonderful sight, the colourful and abundantly stocked stalls occupying a lengthy portion of an exceedingly narrow and seemingly endless street. I lingered awhile, chatting to the vendors and taking a few photographs. Among the people I spoke to was a rather dour Bulgarian fellow and a pair of effervescent Pakistanis. I didn’t get much out of the former, who appeared to resent me photographing his cabbages. The Pakistanis, on the other hand, were quite chatty. One of them was very happy, telling me how he had moved here from Islamabad, how he loved his job, made good money and enjoyed living in Greece. The other, although claiming to be not dissatisfied, seemed far less sanguine about his prospects. Indeed, we had no sooner started talking than he asked me to expedite his migration to Australia.

I replied that I didn’t think I could be of much help to him in that, whereupon he looked momentarily downcast, although he brightened up when I asked whether I could take his photograph. Unfortunately, I appear to have since deleted the image, possibly because the man didn’t prove to be particularly photogenic.

The same couldn’t be said of the produce, which came from the four ends of the country and looked quite remarkable: olives of all sizes and varieties, marvellous heads of cabbage and broccoli, exquisite-looking artichokes, and hundreds upon hundreds of oranges and lemons. Everything was in prime condition and, what’s more, going for a song.

Back in town I checked the metro again, but nothing had changed: the place was in gridlock. Accordingly, since lunchtime was approaching, I went off in search of somewhere to eat, eventually settling on a modest taverna down by the market. I don’t remember the name of this establishment, but it was long and narrow in its dimensions and, rather like Kafeneion O Stamatis, featured a host of black-and-white photographs plastered over its walls. The images in this case celebrated Rembetika, the gritty musical movement of the lower classes that rose to prominence in the 1920s, in urban centres such as Piraeus, largely under the influence of the one and a half million refugees that flooded Greece in the population exchange with Kemal Ataturk’s newly-fashioned Turkey.

I will largely remember this lunch for the efforts of the taverna owner, a mild-looking man with gentle eyes and tufts of grey hair on either side of his bald head. Not long after I arrived he sat himself down on a stool in front of the kitchen and, strumming a much-loved bouzouki, launched into a series of tunes for the benefit of an audience that consisted of myself and two other men. Over a pleasant meal of salad and soutzoukakia, or Smyrna meatballs, washed down by a half-litre of fairly bland white wine, I was treated to a lengthy procession of dirge-like but otherwise enjoyable songs about lost love, loneliness, despair, dispossession, gaol, exile and various other cheery themes – virtually the entire Rembetika lexicon, in fact. All that was missing was a waterpipe or two and the intoxicating fumes of hashish misting the air, together, I guess, with a larger and more enthusiastic crowd, including a faintly sinister coterie of fedora-hatted and idiosyncratically dressed manges with the Ζεϊμπέκικο rhythm in their hearts and knives protruding from the tops of their shiny, pointy-toed boots.

Throughout the performance the man’s wife and daughter sat at a table to one side, talking incessantly between themselves. They had no doubt witnessed this countless times before and, to judge by their demeanour, were no longer impressed. I, too, eventually finished my meal and departed, with an appreciative wave to the singer, after having arrived at the tipping point where one more song about lost, abandoned or otherwise blighted love would have had me seriously considering blowing my brains out. I headed straight to the Metro station, where I was amazed and heartened to find that the queues of people had evaporated.

In the city centre, having decided that there wasn’t enough time left to do anything much except drink, I headed to Brettos, a popular bar in the Plaka notorious for its surrealistically coloured liqueurs. Atmospherically backlit shelves lined with bottles of these lurid concoctions extend from the scuffed wooden floor to the high moulded ceiling. Together with a picturesque assembly of timber barrels, marble-topped benches, an old-fashioned cash register and, in the window, an antique copper kazano, or still, they make the place a sure-fire hit with visiting tourists, the majority of whom enter Brettos with eyes wide as lamps and jaws hanging open.

To be fair, Brettos is just as popular with locals, for whom it serves as a congenial late-night venue. It also offers far more to the palate than its gaudy liqueurs: high quality and variously graded ouzos and brandies and an excellent raki, all made according to zealously guarded recipes, plus a stupendous selection of Greek wines, make this a hotspot for any serious drinker. I can vouch for its attractions, having once become so carried away by its charms that I went within a whisker of missing the afternoon ferry back to Tilos.

On this occasion, having started on wine, I felt that it was pointless drinking anything but raki. I knocked back several glasses and, as I sipped, chatted with Christos, the genial barman on duty; although such was the nature of the occasion, that unfortunately I recall almost nothing of what passed between us.

]]>http://whenthewineisbitter.com/loose-ends/feed/2842Metro Madnesshttp://whenthewineisbitter.com/785-2/
http://whenthewineisbitter.com/785-2/#commentsThu, 22 Mar 2018 09:20:20 +0000http://whenthewineisbitter.com/?p=785I found a place in the backstreets, among the ships’ chandlers and travel agencies. ‘Kafeneion…

I found a place in the backstreets, among the ships’ chandlers and travel agencies. ‘Kafeneion O Stamatis’, said the sign above the footpath, which in another lifetime may have lit up at night, but, from its dusty, timeworn appearance, appeared destined never to shine again. Within, a handful of elderly men in raffish jackets and an assortment of hats were scattered around the plain wooden tables, seated on cane-bottomed chairs against timber-panelled walls hung with black-and-white photographs depicting scenes from the history of Piraeus. A susurration of interest went around the room as I entered, but nothing was said as the kafetzis, a younger, slow-moving man with a faintly dolorous expression, wandered over to take my order. He also said little, merely nodding when I asked for a double Greek coffee, metrio, or semi-sweet.

The coffee arrived and I wrote up my notes as I drank it, aware of the rotation of komboloi in gnarled old hands and the sporadic mutter of conversation, interspersed by ripples of laughter, passing back and forth across the room. I was writing about my arrival in Greece the previous day, remembering how I had gazed from the window of the aeroplane as we came down out of the clouds at the grey-blue sea, its rumpled surface strewn with whitecaps, rugged limestone mountains, scrubby slopes and orderly rows of olive trees in fields of vivid red earth. Whitewashed villages dotted the landscape, as well as isolated farm buildings, and radio towers crowned the highest peaks. No-one stood up and applauded when we landed, as they used to do on Olympic; but then I had flown from Doha, with Qatar Airways, and not all the passengers were Greek.

In the terminal I listened eagerly to the sound of the Greek language, relishing the sound of it as I tried to decipher the odd familiar phrase. The immigration officer who stamped my passport smiled and said, ‘Welcome.’ There followed an excruciating half-hour standing on a cold and featureless railway platform, waiting among a crowd of shivering locals (all of whom were dressed more appropriately than me) for a train into the city, in the teeth of a northerly gale that seemed to be blowing all the way from Siberia and drove icicles through my jacket. I watched the station clock with seer-like intensity: never in my life has the minute hand moved so slowly. But this, too, I said to myself, hastily shrugging on a woollen pullover that was to prove largely ineffectual against the wintry onslaught, is part of the adventure.

I wrote about drinking my first ouzo, in a café off Syntagma, and about the old fellow who offered to show me around and who, when I gave him a euro to encourage him to leave me alone, complained that it wasn’t enough. I wrote, too, about the wonderful meal of salad and gemista, tomatoes stuffed with rice, and the red wine with which I washed it down, sitting outside a busy taverna in a wash of lemony sunlight that appeared unexpectedly through a break in the clouds and proved surprisingly warm – so warm, in fact, that I had been able to remove my jacket and pullover and sit there, quietly marvelling at the scenes unfolding around me, in just a long-sleeved linen shirt.

When I finished writing and got up to pay for my coffee, the kafetzis asked me where I came from. He was behind his counter, brewing another metrio over a hissing gas flame. I told him and said that I was bound for Crete, adding, ‘I want to go into the mountains and drink raki.’ At this a happy smile transformed his face while amused laughter swept around the room, with several of the old men repeating, ‘He’s going to the mountains to drink raki,’ amidst renewed expressions of mirth. I left the kafeneion to shouts of ‘Kalo taxidi!’ ‘Good journey!’ feeling pleased by my little joke and happy that I had just made some friends.

Possibly I should have known better. This time, at least, I did manage to board the Blue Horizon (after a brisk walk around the harbour past a number of ferries bound for different corners of the Aegean, all, I noticed with pleasure, in the process of loading). But as luck would have it, I had no sooner established myself on the upper deck of the vessel, laying out my notebook and pen on a white plastic table and placing the bottle of wine beside them and my bag of food on a chair, than an announcement came over the intercom, first in Greek, then in English, informing passengers that on account of continuing bad weather sailing had been delayed till nine o’clock that evening. My initial reaction was to burst out laughing: this winter business was going too far. But then, as the implications of the situation set in, I wondered how I was going to entertain myself for the day, weighed down as I was by an unwieldy trio of heavily loaded rucksacks.

The problem was solved by one of the ship’s officers, a tall, grey-haired, imperious man in a smart navy jacket glittering with epaulettes. He ran a calculating eye over my gear and, after satisfying himself that it was manageable, summoned the purser whom he instructed to place the rucksacks in a little room off the lounge. Thus unencumbered I took to the stairs, receiving during the course of my descent the best wishes of several impeccably groomed and unaccountably cheerful crew members positioned at well-spaced intervals along the way. It was a quite a long trek down and by the time I stepped on to the dock I was feeling quite puffed up with self-importance.

I was brought back to earth with the proverbial crash when I arrived at the Metro station. This venerable transport hub was a scene of chaos, with a queue of people snaking across the ticket hall, virtually all the way back into the street. People were shouting – always a bad sign! – and waving their arms. The majority, however, possibly having become accustomed to such scenarios, waited stoically in line with long-suffering expressions on their faces, now and then uttering a forlorn-sounding Panagia mou! and dolefully shaking their heads.

Briefly, I wondered why no-one was using the ticket machines at the rear of the hall – only to suddenly remember, the previous evening, trying to operate one of these devices at Monastiraki and having no luck. Instead of offering me a ticket, it had asked me to top up a card. At the time, elevated with wine and ouzo, I had thought nothing of it, blithely purchasing my ticket from a woman seated behind a window. When the same thing happened now, however, the alarm bells started ringing. Something was clearly amiss, but I could only guess what it was – a new system, most likely, the implementation of which had not been properly thought through. My feelings of unease were heightened by the sight of Athenians to the left and right of me ineffectually pressing buttons, muttering curses and imprecations and generally looking, I thought, more confused than I was.

Reluctantly I joined the queue. I was just in time to witness an amusing incident. Inevitably in these situations, queue-jumping is rampant. However it was soon brought home to me, with amusing clarity, that little solidarity exists between the practitioners of this art. I watched with interest as a man succeeded in infiltrating himself, by nefarious means, towards the front of the queue. Hot on his heels followed a companion, who had the misfortune to be caught in the act – red-handed, as it were – by a coterie of respectable-looking Greek matrons. The women turned on him in a fury, castigating him roundly and threatening to brain him with their handbags unless he returned to where he came from and minded his manners in future. The first queue-jumper, perhaps looking to legitimise his standing, showed his companion – who by now looked quite terrified – no sympathy. In fact, he enthusiastically joined in the denunciations, waving a reproving finger in front of the other man’s face and telling him, quite heatedly, that his behaviour was unacceptable.

The queue, meanwhile, progressed at a snail’s pace, if at all. This was odd, even by Greek standards, but it was only after some time and a good deal of scrutiny that I began to grasp what was going on. My enlightenment began when I noticed that the queue was composed of predominantly elderly people, all of them clutching thick sheaves of papers in their hands. I then happened to see one old boy standing before a ticket window with his chest puffed up and his head held proudly erect, posing to have his photograph taken by the woman seated behind the glass. There ensued a good deal of confabulation as the man handed over his papers which the woman scrutinised in a desultory manner, before gracing them with a weary signature and endorsing them with a stamp. A short while later the man turned around, holding something in his hand and bearing on his craggy old face the exalted and somewhat disbelieving expression of someone who has just won the lottery; while the woman behind the window, looking as if it were all becoming too much for her, took out a cigarette and contentedly lit up.

I was so impressed by this unconventional way of doing business that I was sorely tempted to put my hands together and applaud. But as I was still none the wiser as to what exactly was taking place, I put the question to an unhappy-looking young man standing behind me with his equally disgruntled girlfriend.

‘Today they are arranging pensioners’ travel cards,’ he gloomily explained, before adding, without a hint of irony, ‘But unfortunately this is not the way to do it.’

Needless to say the kafetzis was surprised to see me again. He commiserated as I explained about the ferry and looked downright affronted when I told him about the gridlock at the Metro. But he smiled slyly when, nodding towards the clock on the wall, I said that I thought the morning was sufficiently well advanced to drink a shot of raki with my coffee. He duly complied with my request and, I’m pleased to say, the two drinks in tandem not only tasted very good, but also went a long way to realigning the day in my favour.

On the upper deck of the Blue Star ferry, Blue Horizon, listening to the droning of the engines and the slapping of waves against the hull of the vessel as we plough, through an angry sea, towards the island of Crete. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the hour, I’m all alone up here, sitting wrapped like a mummy in my brand-new (and frightfully expensive) Western Mountaineering sleeping bag amidst a sprawl of white plastic tables and chairs strewn pell-mell across the shiny, blue-painted metal deck. Football is showing to an audience of no-one on the screen above the bar, which has been closed for hours. Beyond the stark neon glow of the deck lights I can faintly discern tendrils of smoke from the stack nearest to me dissipating in the wind against the backdrop of a dour, indeterminate sky. I’ve eaten and drunk reasonably well and have even managed some sleep, curled up under my table, so am feeling quite cheerful. It’s my second night in Greece after a long and occasionally challenging absence and everything glows with an aura of novelty and the promise of adventure. I’m looking forward to arriving on Crete.

The ferry is scheduled to arrive at Herakleion, the busy and somewhat down-at-heel capital of the great island, sometime around 6 a.m. According the purser, however, with whom I recently spoke, it’s unlikely we’ll be reaching port until seven at the earliest. ‘Kakos kairos,’ he said. Bad weather. The culprit is my old sparring partner, O Boreias, the north wind – still known, incidentally, by the same name by which he went in antiquity when, according to myth, he cannily transformed himself into a serpent and impregnated the cosmic egg, thereby creating the world – which has already delayed our departure from Piraeus by twenty-four hours. During this enforced hiatus, I’m sorry to say, I didn’t manage to accomplish terribly much – unless, that is, you count as achievements the consumption of large amounts of coffee and wine and raki, while simultaneously wolfing down some excellent food and making the acquaintance of a number of engaging people. I also became embroiled in a melee in the metro station, which reminded me – if any reminding was needed – why it is that I love coming to Greece.

The day had started promisingly enough. Waking well before dawn in my small, neat and imaginatively coloured – two-tone lime-green-and-turquoise walls, a blue-painted wooden door with pink trim – room on the second floor of the aged and battered, but still somehow noble, Hotel Sparti (erected in 1850, the fine neoclassical building has housed at various times in its history the French Embassy and the Greek Admiralty and has also featured, according to its modest, one-page publicity flyer, in numerous films and documentaries), I could hear nothing of the wind that had whistled around the window for the best part of the night. In its place a lulling and encouraging silence gripped the building (which, despite its great age, failed to emit so much as a groan or creak). Prostrate in my sagging bed, huddled beneath a quartet of brown woollen blankets that looked sufficiently faded and threadbare to have seen service with the French, I felt optimistic that the ferry would leave as planned at 10 a.m. I laid my plans accordingly, visualising how, upon rising, I would go and drink some wonderful Greek coffee somewhere while I wrote up my notes, then afterwards find a shop and buy provisions for the journey to Crete.

Originally the ferry had been scheduled to depart at nine the previous evening; but when, in an arctic twilight beneath a lambent sky, I had made my way to its doors I was greeted by a crew member dressed in faded khaki overalls seated just inside the passenger entrance – actually leaning back on his chair, he was – who cheerfully informed me that sailing had been delayed on account of the weather. The fellow looked like he was enjoying his job, which made the information easier to swallow. Moreover, hitches of this sort are part and parcel of sea travel in Greece, especially in winter, and as it was my first day in the country and I had already consumed quite a few drinks, I was not particularly upset. Hell, I said to myself, what’s one night in port going to matter?It might even be interesting. In this upbeat and indomitable frame of mind I thanked the fellow for his time and bid him a good evening, before retracing my steps around the harbour past several big white ferries that lay, similarly stranded, on the swirling, iron-coloured water. Upon immersing myself in the streets it took me no time at all to zero in on the Sparti, whose air of faded grandeur I found immediately appealing.

I waited until daylight had dawned beyond the window before getting out of bed, dressing, completing fifty-odd push-ups, and leaving the hotel, whereupon the sight of a dramatic sky above Piraeus caused me to alter my plans – instead of going for coffee, I would instead walk to the harbour and take some photographs to commemorate the grand occasion. From the still-elegant hotel portal it lay a short walk away, around the corner, more or less.

The streets at that hour were full of people, most of them heading towards the metro. Nearly everyone was bundled up in coats and hats and scarves and gloves. The expressions on their faces, I noticed, were uncharacteristically humourless and grim. (This really is a marvellous time of year to be in Greece.) At the lights on the busy road outside the harbour gates a crowd waited, tense and expectant. When the signal turned to green they charged en masse – straight, as it happened, in my direction, which meant that I had to employ some fancy footwork in order to pass through their undeviating midst. Emerging unscathed from the throng I found myself, moments later, within the harbour precinct, where the weather was creating some spectacular effects. A brisk wind that gusted on and off skated across the water, etching patterns on its cold metallic surface, while through ragged apertures in the bruised and billowing sky shafts of pale yellow sunlight descended, alighting like celestial spotlights both on the sea and on the gleaming flanks of the big white ferries that lay becalmed upon it. The effect was mesmerising and I felt very much one with the moment as I took my camera from its case and started clicking away, mindful as I did so of the cars and lorries that raced and rumbled around me, each embowered in its own pungent cloud of exhaust. It wouldn’t have done to be run over on my second day in Greece.

At the forefront of my mind, of course, was the realisation that I was in Greece. For the last four years I had been uneasily stationary in Australia. During this period I had not only forgotten what it was like to travel, but I had also lost sight of my travelling self – the person, in other words, who used to walk among mountains, drink like a fish and do all sorts of other odd things like sleep under olive trees, wrestle with cats and converse with goats. In his place another person had materialised, a rather staid and unenterprising individual whose role was to look after his ailing mother and whose most inspired moments of a day were his walks into town to do the shopping. He was a bit of a dullard, this fellow, sober and pedestrian, who felt detached from life by circumstances and became increasingly unmoved by, and uninterested in, it. Physical ailments – both real and imaginary – assailed him. Mentally he was a widely yawning door.

I had the feeling that the other person was out there somewhere, only waiting to be found. But until I had tracked him down I felt not only uncertain, but also quite apprehensive, about my prospects. Accordingly, whenever anyone asked me whether I was looking forward to returning to Greece, I tended to prevaricate, unwilling – or unable – to wax lyrical about the future because I felt, quite honestly, incapable of imagining it. Perhaps, too, deep down I didn’t want to hex myself, to give myself, as it were, the ‘evil eye’ by expostulating too extravagantly on how I planned to live or what I hoped to achieve during my upcoming travels. My former life and adventures in Greece seemed so long ago, separated from the present and rendered somehow unreal by an extended and rather weird interlude that, no matter how hard I tried, I found impossible either to clarify or explain, even to myself.

Now it seemed that I need not have worried. Indeed the pieces were falling back into place with astonishing rapidity. As if in pursuit of a kind of vestigial memory I found my way to the local market. This was a single covered laneway in the backstreets behind the waterfront, lined by tiny shops and stalls, the proprietors of which were only just then raising the shutters on their premises. At that hour there were few shoppers in attendance and the ground was clear of the squashed tomatoes, discarded cabbage leaves and what have you that would, over the course of the morning, inevitably accumulate. Absent, too, were the ghastly displays of bloody carcases – sheep, goats, chickens, rabbits – that the resident butchers erected, presumably to attract trade, outside their shops. At the end of the lane I encountered a fish stall stripped and ready for action; a handful of men, bearded and rubber-booted and as thickly swathed in dirty woollens as if they’d just stepped off a caique in the harbour, presided over metal trays of iced and gleaming denizens of the sea, all recently hauled up and disconcertingly stiff and glassy-eyed. (The men also affected an oddly inanimate posture, deprived as yet of the customers whose presence would inspire them to dizzy heights of eloquence). I lingered briefly, curious to see what was on offer; but upon reflecting that a raw fish or an octopus or a pile of shrimp were – however potentially tasty – unlikely to be of much use to me on the ferry, I redirected my steps to a well-stocked smallgoods store across the way where I bought a wedge of graviera cheese, a length of piquant salami and a small bag of wrinkled black olives. The owner seemed a happy-go-lucky, wide-awake sort of fellow, who, upon learning that I was bound for Crete, wished me ‘Kalo taxidi!’ a ‘good journey’, before shouting like an afterthought, as I exited his shop, ‘Drink a raki for me when you arrive.’ I shouted back that I most certainly would.

I finished my provisioning with a 1.5 litre plastic water bottle full of pale red wine, which I purchased from a grumpy, craggy-faced old boy with five days’ worth of stubble greyly prickling his chin and a cigarette clamped between his lips, whom I found in the process of hauling an antique bain-marie into the street. Possibly because of the effort involved in this, the sale of the wine, for the paltry sum of two euros fifty, failed to excite him. In fact, he merely grunted when I thanked him and wished him a cheerful farewell, while I went off singing. With the completion of my purchases it was time to find some coffee.